Developer George Ablah helped shape Wichita

A city develops the way it does for many reasons. For Wichita, George Ablah was one of those reasons.

The Wichita businessman died Monday at age 85.

After a brilliant career in real estate development during the 1960s and ’70s buying, renovating and selling commercial properties in Houston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Detroit, Atlanta and Chicago, among other cities, Ablah was in 1984 at age 55 interested in slowing down and focusing on a couple of big projects.

He and his wife and business partner, Virginia, had become multimillionaires, flying 250,000 miles a year in his Gulfstream jet with an interior custom designed to hold Henry Moore sculptures.

A few years earlier, he had completed the biggest deal of his career: In 1979, Ablah and Charles Koch had bought Chrysler Realty, the owner of 800 Chrysler dealerships. The car company was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed all the cash it could find.

Chrysler bought back some of the dealerships in 1982, and Ablah and Koch ended the partnership. Ablah took as part of his share a large troubled office complex in New York and 1,400 acres of land in northeast Wichita.

That land in northeast Wichita was a large slice of Comotara, a grand project originally envisioned by Wichita entrepreneur Jack DeBoer in 1972 as a stunning 3,600-acre residential-commercial-industrial community framed by 21st and 45th streets and Woodlawn and Webb Road.

Comotara – from Como, a famously beautiful lake in northern Italy, and Tara, a royal residence and gathering place in ancient Ireland – would have thousands of homes, hundreds of commercial and industrial businesses. DeBoer said it would take 10 years to build.

But a little more than a year later, in November 1973, DeBoer was forced to sell the nearly six-square-mile site to the Ford Foundation for $17 million to help pay off a growing debt in his other businesses.

Ablah developed many of the buildings and shopping centers along Rock Road north of 21st, including Comotara Tower at 29th Street North and Rock Road, as well as the 500-acre Willowbend golf course and residential community, with partner Johnny Stevens.

In 1989, Ablah and Koch donated most of the land for the right of way for East K-96, the high-speed access that has made far northeast Wichita development boom.

Ablah’s brother Don Ablah, a longtime Wichita real estate broker, said that his brother’s efforts were so big they changed the city’s development pattern. Normally, he said, the heaviest commercial development follows the major highways, and that was true in Wichita. It moved basically east within a mile or two of Kellogg until the mid-1980s.

George Ablah’s development of northeast Wichita pulled the center of gravity northeast and created added demand for that K-96 improvement.

Don Ablah said they tried in the early ’80s to recruit restaurateur Antoine Toubia to move his Olive Tree from Kellogg to 29th and Rock. They drove around the proposed site. Toubia was unimpressed.

“When he got back, his maitre d’ asked him how it went,” Don Ablah said. “He said, ‘Mark, I’ll tell you. When you drive around for 30 minutes and the biggest thing going on is two coyotes chasing a jackrabbit, you know you’ve gone too far for a restaurant.’ ”

Don Ablah laughed and said the brothers took Toubia up there every year for four years as development in the area grew before he committed to moving.

George Ablah got caught in a downturn in the real estate market and a change in state tax rules in the late 1980s and early ’90s. He and his wife declared bankruptcy in 1992. They sold properties and personal belongings, such as their $1 million-plus Vickridge home, high-priced art collection, jewelry and personal jet, to raise money, and they turned over all their big Wichita real estate holdings to creditors.

But that wasn’t end of Ablah, said prominent Wichita banker J.V. Lentell, a friend of Ablah’s for decades. He continued to buy and sell real estate, mostly out of town, afterward. He maintained his almost uncanny ability to spot a distressed property with a big up side.

“He got back on his feet,” Lentell said. “He wasn’t afraid to take a risk.”

Of all of the developers in Wichita history, George Ablah would be near the top, Lentell said.

“No question about it, Wichita wouldn’t be the same without him,” he said.

This story was originally published October 28, 2014 at 5:51 PM with the headline "Developer George Ablah helped shape Wichita."